Record Details

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Field Value
 
Title Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AMUDUW
 
Creator Davies, Mark
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Largest structured corpus of American English composed of more than 450 million words in 189,431 texts, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2012. The corpus is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts
 
Subject Arts and Humanities
Other
English language
Corpora (Linguistics)
Computational linguistics
 
Language English
 
Contributor McNeill, Katherine
 
Relation Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)
 
Type linguistic corpora
 
Source The corpus is composed of more than 450 million words in 189,431 texts, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2012. Detailed information on sources is available at: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?f=texts_e. Main sources for each file type are as follows:
• Spoken: (95 million words [95,385,672]) Transcripts of unscripted conversation from more than 150 different TV and radio programs (examples: All Things Considered (NPR), Newshour (PBS), Good Morning America (ABC), Today Show (NBC), 60 Minutes (CBS), Hannity and Colmes (Fox), Jerry Springer, etc). [See notes on the naturalness and authenticity of the language from these transcripts).
• Fiction: (90 million words [90,344,134]) Short stories and plays from literary magazines, children’s magazines, popular magazines, first chapters of first edition books 1990-present, and movie scripts.
• Popular Magazines: (95 million words [95,564,706]) Nearly 100 different magazines, with a good mix (overall, and by year) between specific domains (news, health, home and gardening, women, financial, religion, sports, etc). A few examples are Time, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Fortune, Christian Century, Sports Illustrated, etc.
• Newspapers: (92 million words [91,680,966]) Ten newspapers from across the US, including: USA Today, New York Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. In most cases, there is a good mix between different sections of the newspaper, such as local news, opinion, sports, financial, etc.
• Academic Journals: (91 million words [91,044,778]) Nearly 100 different peer-reviewed journals. These were selected to cover the entire range of the Library of Congress classification system (e.g. a certain percentage from B (philosophy, psychology, religion), D (world history), K (education), T (technology), etc.), both overall and by number of words per year